Bad Breeding Season Spells Trouble for Endangered Whale

Left unchecked, human activity killing the North Atlantic right whales could make them go extinct in 20 years, experts say.

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Northern right whale mother and calf swimming off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There were no known calves born in the winter of 2017/2018.

Photograph by Brian J. Skerry, National Geographic Creative

PUBLISHED February 27, 2018

This past winter has conservationists trying to save the North Atlantic right whale worried.

Their winter breeding season is currently ending, and no new calves have been seen. Births tend to peak in waters off the coast of Florida and Georgia in January and February. Experts say it's still possible that one or two may have been born but out of view of coastal monitors.

"I think everyone remains hopeful that whales will turn up on the feeding grounds with babies still," says Tonya Wimmer from the Marine Animal Response Society. "In some years... a few animals have turned up with a baby that wasn't observed on the breeding grounds. Usually most moms are observed there... maybe something was different this year and they decided to have babies elsewhere…we can only hope and wait to see."

Fewer and fewer calves are born every year, she says, and one reason scientists suspect this is happening is that female whales are not able to gain enough weight to become pregnant.

Entanglement, one of the specie's biggest threats, could also be causing females an undue amount of stress.

"What we see a lot of in the body count [is] they will carry gear with them for weeks, months, or years," she notes. "That [stress] factor lasts a long time...There's also stress associated with ship noise and ocean noise."

For an animal on the brink, not having more young to replace the old is bad news.

Doomed?

Before the 1930s, hunting dwindled the whale population. In fact, according to the WWF, they earned their name from hunters who deemed them the "right" whales to hunt.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the species began to make a comeback, but in the past decade they've again declined.

Entanglement and ship strikes account for most of the threats facing the species today. Many of the whales found dead in Canada this summer died because of blunt force trauma. For an animal as large as a right whale, ships are the only object capable of dealing the fatal blow.

"Right whales will be gone in 20 years if we do nothing," says Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Unlike endangered animals like chimpanzees, whales can't be bred in captivity. Human intervention to save their species relies on limiting impacts from commerce like fishing and shipping.

Baumgartner and other marine conservationists say they know how to pull North Atlantic right whales back from the brink, but they need buy-in from the public and governments to make it happen.

"Entanglement injuries are gruesome," says Baumgartner. "They would never be tolerated in view of the public."

Meaning, he says, if people could see the way fishing wire cuts through a whale's flesh, there would be a sympathetic outcry.